Blog From The Bench

I got some bad news tonight. As of this evening, my long-running webcomic New In Town has officially ceased to exist.

After more than a year of frustrated e-mails and phone calls, all as a result of problems with transferring my domain name from one service to the other, I learned tonight that they sold some other bastard my domain name. So, three years-plus of hard work on that silly little comic, and it's all gone now.

A longitme comic book fan, I fell in love with the idea of webcomics after reading Scott McCloud's Reinventing Comics. Here, it seemed, was a way for writers and artists to express themselves and develop an audience without having to negotiate the complicated and expensive publishing process. It promised to breathe new life into the then (and still) dried up independent comics scene. This was the way to get my voice heard, and now it's over.

Everybody's telling me to "buckle up" and start the whole thing over again, with a whole new domain name, etc. But I'm wondering: What's the point? Doesn't the fact that this has happened just prove that dreams don't come true?